The Cloud Messenger

About the Book

London, that distant rainy place his father lived in once, is where Mehran finds himself after leaving Karachi. And it is there that his adult life unfolds: he discovers the joys of poetry, faces the trials of love and work and spends his dreaming hours ‘sending cloud messages to other places’.

A feeling of restlessness pursues Mehran as he travels to Italy, India and Pakistan. But the relationships he forms — with wounded, passionate Marvi, volatile Marco and the enigmatic Riccarda — and his power of recollection finally bring him some sense, however fleeting, of belonging, in this beautifully poignant paean to lost love.

About the Author

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and moved to London in the early 1970s. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and reviews regularly for the Independent and the TLS. Aamer has published four collections of short stories and a novella, Another Gulmohar Tree, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Europe and South Asia 2010.

Reviews

'A thing of beauty ... You must read it.'
Nadeem Aslam

'There is a lyrical quality to Hussein's novel, and the snippets of love poetry he weaves into the narrative resonate with Mehran's spiritual journey and his rites of passage as a writer.'
Independent

'Elegantly melancholy, yet sharp-eyed too. I was reminded simultaneously of the early 19th-century French and of poetic worlds I didn't know at all. A shower of pleasures.'
Julia O'Faolain

'By turns melancholy and humorous, The Cloud Messenger is an intense depiction of Mehran's love for these two women ... Sophisticated, cosmopolitan and seductive, the novel engages mind and senses alike.'
André Naffis-Sahely, Times Literary Supplement

'The Cloud Messenger is imbued with a romanticism which stems as much from the European tradition as it does from classical Persian poetry ... A hauntingly grown-up novel of love and contingency, friendship and tragedy.'
Alison Fell